Independent manuscript copies allow cross-verification of corrupted Arabic-Christian translations.

Evidence

Of this work I found in Tunis—may God preserve it—a copy in Arabic and another one in Spanish. An Andalusian who used to translate brought these two copies, but I found in the Spanish [copy] nonsense and lies not to be found in the Arabic version. (85–87) … At this point, van Koningsveld informs us that “the author blotted out the following 16 lines of his text, which have thus become illegible.” This appears to suggest that the Leiden scholars think their base text derived from a holograph. That seems to me not proven. We do not, incidentally, have the Spanish text to which reference is made, but in the British Library (Harley 7507) there exists a completely independent transcription of the book. This particular London manuscript was the work of Bartolomeus a Pectorano, one of the translators employed in Italy on the texts when they were under study in Rome. A complete edition of the London manuscript will be found in the appendix to Harvey (1956). In a great number of places where the copyist in Tunis, whoever he was, had to mark “blank in the manuscript,” the scholar working in Rome records a plausible reading. For my translation of key sections of this British Library manuscript, see appendix 3. — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1307

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Survey data-file encoding artifacts can corrupt key variables. — Ilyana Kuziemko and Ebonya Washington, Why Did the Democrats Lose the South?…, 1022